The ShrinkGeek guide to healthy eating at Gen Con

Gen Con. The Best Four Days In Gaming. This weekend long gathering of geeks in downtown Indianapolis is one of the few times in your life where the large majority of people who you meet on the street will have a set of polyhedral dice on their person. Call it a bad stereotype if you like, but chances are a lot of the people you meet are (or should be) trying to shed some of their natural encumbrance. Unfortunately for them it’s difficult to eat wisely when you’re at a convention, but it isn’t impossible. All it takes is a little homework and self-control.

We here at ShrinkGeek are going to do some of the homework for you.

Underneath the cut you’ll find a list of some of the restaurants in the downtown Indianapolis area that Gen Con attendees tend to frequent. We’ll give a brief overview of the restaurant itself and try to point you toward some of the less calorie blasting choices off of the menu. Check back often as we’ll be updating this list as we gather additional information and take suggestions from some of the attendees themselves!

See you in Indianapolis!

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Truth in advertising

Advertising Fail courtesy of the Fail Blog

If you’ve watched television at all in the last 10 years or so you are most likely familiar with the name Jared Fogel, and if not you’d likely recognize him if you saw a picture. Jared is “the Subway guy.” For those of you who are not familiar with his admittedly impressive story, the Reader’s Digest version is that back in 1997 Jared lost an incredible amount of weight by following what he termed “The Subway Diet.” The diet program in and of itself was pretty simple. Jared, who had been consuming what he estimates as nearly 10,000 calories a day, replaced two of his meals with six inch sandwiches from Subway’s “7 under 6” menu (sandwiches with a total of less than six grams of fat). He also walked pretty much everywhere and added other types of exercise on top of that. In the end he managed to lose over 240 pounds, and when the advertising executives at Subway caught wind of his success they hired him as a spokesman. That move turned out to be a smashing success for the restaurant chain, and Jared has been associated with them ever since.

While many restaurants have tried to duplicate the success that Subway had marketing themselves as a diet-friendly fast food alternative there is little doubt that Subway has remained the uncontested king of the healthy lifestyle hill.  So far they’ve managed to fight off all other pretenders to their throne, but it looks like they may be facing a new challenge from a fairly unlikely source.

Taco Bell.

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